Besides the recent impressive results on reinforcement learning (RL), safety is still one of the major research challenges in RL. RL is a machine-learning approach to determine near-optimal policies in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this paper, we consider the setting where the safety-relevant fragment of the MDP together with a temporal logic safety specification is given and many safety violations can be avoided by planning ahead a short time into the future. We propose an approach for online safety shielding of RL agents. During runtime, the shield analyses the safety of each available action. For any action, the shield computes the maximal probability to not violate the safety specification within the next $k$ steps when executing this action. Based on this probability and a given threshold, the shield decides whether to block an action from the agent. Existing offline shielding approaches compute exhaustively the safety of all state-action combinations ahead of time, resulting in huge computation times and large memory consumption. The intuition behind online shielding is to compute at runtime the set of all states that could be reached in the near future. For each of these states, the safety of all available actions is analysed and used for shielding as soon as one of the considered states is reached. Our approach is well suited for high-level planning problems where the time between decisions can be used for safety computations and it is sustainable for the agent to wait until these computations are finished. For our evaluation, we selected a 2-player version of the classical computer game SNAKE. The game represents a high-level planning problem that requires fast decisions and the multiplayer setting induces a large state space, which is computationally expensive to analyse exhaustively.

Safety is still one of the major research challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we address the problem of how to avoid safety violations of RL agents during exploration in probabilistic and partially unknown environments. Our approach combines automata learning for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and shield synthesis in an iterative approach. Initially, the MDP representing the environment is unknown. The agent starts exploring the environment and collects traces. From the collected traces, we passively learn MDPs that abstractly represent the safety-relevant aspects of the environment. Given a learned MDP and a safety specification, we construct a shield. For each state-action pair within a learned MDP, the shield computes exact probabilities on how likely it is that executing the action results in violating the specification from the current state within the next $k$ steps. After the shield is constructed, the shield is used during runtime and blocks any actions that induce a too large risk from the agent. The shielded agent continues to explore the environment and collects new data on the environment. Iteratively, we use the collected data to learn new MDPs with higher accuracy, resulting in turn in shields able to prevent more safety violations. We implemented our approach and present a detailed case study of a Q-learning agent exploring slippery Gridworlds. In our experiments, we show that as the agent explores more and more of the environment during training, the improved learned models lead to shields that are able to prevent many safety violations.

运行时执行是指针对运行时正式规范执行正确行为的理论，技术和工具。在本文中，我们对用于构建AI中执行安全性的混凝土应用程序域的运行时执行器的技术感兴趣。我们讨论了传统上如何在AI领域处理安全性，以及如何通过集成运行时执行器来提供自我学习代理的安全性。我们调查了此类执法者的一系列工作，在该工作中，我们区分了离散和连续动作空间的方法。本文的目的是更好地理解不同执法技术的优势和局限性，重点关注由于AI在AI中的应用而引起的特定挑战。最后，我们为未来的工作提出了一些开放的挑战和途径。

Diversity Searcher is a tool originally developed to help analyse diversity in news media texts. It relies on a form of automated content analysis and thus rests on prior assumptions and depends on certain design choices related to diversity and fairness. One such design choice is the external knowledge source(s) used. In this article, we discuss implications that these sources can have on the results of content analysis. We compare two data sources that Diversity Searcher has worked with - DBpedia and Wikidata - with respect to their ontological coverage and diversity, and describe implications for the resulting analyses of text corpora. We describe a case study of the relative over- or under-representation of Belgian political parties between 1990 and 2020 in the English-language DBpedia, the Dutch-language DBpedia, and Wikidata, and highlight the many decisions needed with regard to the design of this data analysis and the assumptions behind it, as well as implications from the results. In particular, we came across a staggering over-representation of the political right in the English-language DBpedia.

Bias elimination and recent probing studies attempt to remove specific information from embedding spaces. Here it is important to remove as much of the target information as possible, while preserving any other information present. INLP is a popular recent method which removes specific information through iterative nullspace projections. Multiple iterations, however, increase the risk that information other than the target is negatively affected. We introduce two methods that find a single targeted projection: Mean Projection (MP, more efficient) and Tukey Median Projection (TMP, with theoretical guarantees). Our comparison between MP and INLP shows that (1) one MP projection removes linear separability based on the target and (2) MP has less impact on the overall space. Further analysis shows that applying random projections after MP leads to the same overall effects on the embedding space as the multiple projections of INLP. Applying one targeted (MP) projection hence is methodologically cleaner than applying multiple (INLP) projections that introduce random effects.

We review clustering as an analysis tool and the underlying concepts from an introductory perspective. What is clustering and how can clusterings be realised programmatically? How can data be represented and prepared for a clustering task? And how can clustering results be validated? Connectivity-based versus prototype-based approaches are reflected in the context of several popular methods: single-linkage, spectral embedding, k-means, and Gaussian mixtures are discussed as well as the density-based protocols (H)DBSCAN, Jarvis-Patrick, CommonNN, and density-peaks.

Recent advances in computer vision have shown promising results in image generation. Diffusion probabilistic models in particular have generated realistic images from textual input, as demonstrated by DALL-E 2, Imagen and Stable Diffusion. However, their use in medicine, where image data typically comprises three-dimensional volumes, has not been systematically evaluated. Synthetic images may play a crucial role in privacy preserving artificial intelligence and can also be used to augment small datasets. Here we show that diffusion probabilistic models can synthesize high quality medical imaging data, which we show for Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) images. We provide quantitative measurements of their performance through a reader study with two medical experts who rated the quality of the synthesized images in three categories: Realistic image appearance, anatomical correctness and consistency between slices. Furthermore, we demonstrate that synthetic images can be used in a self-supervised pre-training and improve the performance of breast segmentation models when data is scarce (dice score 0.91 vs. 0.95 without vs. with synthetic data).

在眼科成像中，多个成像系统，例如颜色眼底，红外，荧光素血管造影，光学相干断层扫描（OCT）或OCT血管造影，通常涉及诊断视网膜疾病。多模式的视网膜注册技术可以通过在不同方式或获取时间的图像中提供基于像素的比较容器结构的比较来帮助眼科医生。为此，我们提出了一种用于多模式视网膜图像注册的端到端可训练的深度学习方法。我们的方法从血管结构中提取卷积特征，以进行关键点检测和描述，并使用图形神经网络进行特征匹配。 KePoint检测和描述网络和图形神经网络使用合成多模式图对以自我监督的方式共同训练，并通过合成采样的地面真实同谱进行指导。我们的方法证明了较高的注册精度作为我们的合成视网膜数据集的竞争方法，并为我们的真实黄斑数据集和公共底面数据集提供了很好的概括。

大型的预训练的语言模型成功地用于多种语言的各种任务中。随着这种不断增加的使用，有害副作用的风险也会上升，例如通过再现和加强刻板印象。但是，在解决多种语言或考虑不同的偏见时，发现和缓解这些危害通常很难做到，并且在计算上变得昂贵。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了Fairdistiltation：一种基于知识蒸馏的跨语性方法，可以在控制特定偏见的同时构建较小的语言模型。我们发现，我们的蒸馏方法不会对大多数任务的下游性能产生负面影响，并成功减轻刻板印象和代表性危害。我们证明，与替代方法相比，Fairdistillation可以以低得多的成本创建更公平的语言模型。

本文介绍了更轻松的项目及其范围的概念概述。更轻松地专注于通过半自治的移动操纵器在灾难反应方案中支持紧急部队。具体来说，我们检查了操作员对系统的信任以及其使用所产生的认知负荷。我们计划讨论不同的研究主题，探讨共享的自主权，互动设计和透明度与信任和认知负担如何相关。另一个目标是开发非侵入性方法，以使用多级方法在灾难响应的背景下连续衡量信任和认知负荷。该项目由多个学术合作伙伴进行，专门从事人工智能，互动设计和心理学，以及灾难响应设备的工业合作伙伴和最终用户，用于制定项目和实验实验。